Brine for chicken thigh before searing

[Josh71]

I am going to cook seared chicken thigh (without bone) with some kind of creamy mushrooms pan-sauce.

 

Before searing, I will use sous vide, to cook it at 65C for 1,5 hour.

 

From what I read, brining before sous vide will improve the texture of the chicken.

 

So, any advice for this brining process?

 

I tried to look up in the internet, there are a lot of variations, with salt or salt+sugar, and also the ratio.

 

50 gram of salt per 1 liter water, would that be good?

 

Should I add sugar? 

 

Is there any minimum / optimum brining time for the best result?

 

Thanks.

Edited June 19, 2015 by Josh71 (log)

[pbear]

I do this a lot.  It doesn't take much salt, between 0.7% and 1.0% by weight depending on personal preference.  Say you have a kilo of thighs (2.2 lb), 0.7% would be 7 grams, just over a tsp of finely ground salt.  This will dissolve in 2 tbsp water (15 g).  Divide thighs between two bags; prepare half quantities of the brine/cure and add to each; seal and cook.  The cool thing about this approach (called an equilibrium brine) is that the chicken can't get too salty, as you've given it exactly the amount you want the final product to have.

[radtek]

50/50 sugar and salt. IIRC a good place to start is 0.6% by weight from the Marianski Bros.

 

Almost always brine chicken and pork.

[pbear]

Oops, overlooked the sugar question.  FWIW, no, I don't generally bother with sugar.  As for time, when possible, I like to let chicken sit on the brine for a couple days, but it's not essential for thighs.  Breast, on the other hand, gets a big texture advantage from brining and you'll only get this if the salt penetrates before cooking.

 

BTW, an equilibrium brine can used for whole chicken, but of course you'll need much more water, say two litres for a two kilo bird.  You use the same proportion, i.e., 11 g for the chicken (which is about 70% meat and skin) and 14 g for the water.  This needs to rest a couple days, as you'll drain the brine before cooking.

Edited June 19, 2015 by pbear (log)

[Josh71]

I fail to understand your method.

How much water for that 1 kg chicken?

Because brining means submerging the chicken under the brine (water), correct?

[Josh71]

Ok, I understand now. It's calculated from the total weight of the chicken plus the water.

The only difficult part is the time.

It seems it needs at least 24 hours to reach equilibrium.

How about, let say 50% equilibrium? Good enough?

Edited June 19, 2015 by Josh71 (log)

[IndyRob]

Brining single pieces of chicken can be done very quickly.  As little as 20 minutes, but I'd allow an hour.

 

If you've got enough water, you really don't need to account for the weight of the meat.  The more brine solution you use, the less the weight of the meat will count in the equation.

 

As I understand it, the sugar can bring two things: 1) Flavor (especially if you use something like brown sugar), and 2) As a counter-balance to all the salt in the brine.  I generally don't use sugar unless I'm following a specific recipe.  I just concentrate.on the percentage of salt in the brine.

 

However, IMHO, I think the cut you've chosen to brine and sous vide is perhaps the worst one possible.  While I'm usually quick to defend modernist techniques against the traditionalists, a chicken thigh is the perfect braising package.  Braising brings some things you will lose with this process.

 

Sous vide will help you avoid overcooking the meat.  Brining will widen the window in which this occurs.  However, a chicken thigh has a lot of connective tissue and we need to cook the crap out of this to break it down (within reason, of course).  I think it will need a lot more than 1 hour at 65C to do this.  At the same time, dark meat is less susceptible to being overcooked in the first place.

 

You want to sear at the end.  For the sauce, this will be inferior to searing at the beginning when you can use a dusting to flour on the thighs and start a sort of integrated roux, while integrating a lot of the tasty brown bits.  Flour the thighs, sear in a bit of oil (not too much) and add liquid.  You can incorporate all manner of things into your braising liquid to add flavor not only to the resulting sauce, but into the meat itself.  Simmer covered on low until the meat is nice and tender, remove it, and then unleash the heat to reduce the liquid.  Finish with some cream.

 

Save some of the sauce for the next day, when you do chicken breasts exactly as you have described.  Maybe without the sear (if you can't keep the skin on - otherwise, what's to sear?).  Just sliced and sauced.  The breasts totally benefit from brining and sous vide.

[paulraphael]

Chicken thighs+sous-vide = magic. 

 

Braising is good too, but then so is stir-fry, stew, soup, fricassee... I like s.v. for thighs because prepared this way they're versatile enough to use almost any way imaginable, and they're resistant enough to overcooking that they never seem to dry out when searing, reheating as leftovers, etc. etc...  And they have flavor. 

 

I've never been compelled to brine them. The texture I get is just about perfect, and the flavor needs no help. Breasts I can understand the case for. But in general I'm anti-brine except for seafood. 

 

For thighs, 64.5C x 3 hours is a sweet spot. 2 hours is often enough if they're small / thin. But the extra time will not dry them out or make them mushy in the least.

[pbear]

Ok, I understand now. It's calculated from the total weight of the chicken plus the water.

The only difficult part is the time.

It seems it needs at least 24 hours to reach equilibrium.

How about, let say 50% equilibrium? Good enough?

 

Yes, it's total weight.  But, if the amount of water is negligible, there's no need to add more salt on its account.  In this context, the difference between 1000 and 1015 grams is trivial.  As mentioned in my second post, though, the water does have to be taken into account if there's much of it.*  When cooking low temp, I tend to use the minimum amount of water possible, in part because I use a vacuum sealer.  If using zip-top bags, there's no reason more water can't be added; just compensate by adding a proportionate amount of salt.

 

* On review, I notice a small error in the calculation for the whole bird brine.  I cribbed that from my recipe for a 5 lb chicken, which for brevity I referred to as being two kilos; in fact, 5 lb is more like 2.25 kg.  Notably, it's 2250 x 0.7 x 0.007 which equals 11 g; the same calculation for 2000 comes in at 9.8 g.  The difference wouldn't actually matter for cooking purposes, but there's not much point in giving an example for illustration if I get the math wrong.  Sorry about that..

 

As for you last question, good enough for what?  If you're brining for seasoning and cook in the brine, it won't matter much.  If you doing it for texture, I imagine you'll get about half the advantage, but I've not done the experiment.